Fan Culture and Produsage

In Jenkins Chapter 4, he discusses the roots of fan culture and how it has evolved. Once starting in villages, the remaking of stories and tales has expanded into fan production in an online version. I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, but the obsession that is still present today gives way for fans to create their own content for the phenomenon of Star Wars. The combination of Star Wars and Cops that we saw in class was….well…strange. I can see the excitement in the creator’s minds about how awesome it would eventually be, but I lack the enthusiasm because I’m not into star wars as much as others.

Fans have always had the ability to recreate the stories they love. The issue lies in the fact that copyright laws don’t always consider the power of the internet and free speech. While we strive to speak our own revisions of great or not great works, we are still using others’ material and putting that to a mass media puts you in the path of a lawsuit. I said in class that I put a commercial on Youtube and it features a Rick Ross song. Instead of suing me, the record label put a link on the page to buy the song if so desired. Take a look at the commercial; it’s my revision of the typical soccer mom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HJb1EYSE-g

We talked about intellectual property in class and the ownership capabilities of your ideas. The great thing about fair use and the rights for fans to make parodies of your creative works allows for some introduction of free speech. Click Here to see the 4 determinants that merit fair use. Each case is different, as I learned from my Mass Communication Law Class.

Loking at Levinson’s Chapter 10, while it doesn’t necessarily go along with everything that we have discussed thus far, it does have some merit in produsage…which I’ll talk about in a minute. Podcasting, which Levinson goes into detail about, is actual a free service provided by iTunes (Levinson, pg. 157). I liked his case study of Grammar Girl on the same page. I don’t really understand how a grammar podcast got such high views, but strange things have happened and perhaps her own method of delivery worked for the time. If you CLICK HERE you can go to her website and listen to it…which I have and she is quite interesting.

Produsage is a very new topic to me in this class. I’m not a great fan of putting words together to make new words, but then again I contradict myself in the Twitter world with my Tweeps and Twitterverse. In any case, produsage is never ending and can be changed, molded, and added to at any time. I will need to venture to the business department to take a closer look into prosumption. I wonder how Dr. Markman feels about the book’s Web 2.0 reference and the controversy around it. Some see it as a way to market on the new media concepts emerging today, but Web 2.0, social software, new media, and new new media are all terms for relatively the same concept. It would be nice to have one phrase that encompasses all, however there are sections and fragments of the internet life that do need separate dedication of knowledge and research.